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Best solutions when homepage won't rank in Google?

My homepage (www.LeatherHideStore.com) will not rank for my keywords in Google - with Google mostly pulling product pages and some categories for serp results. In contrast, my homepage consistently shows for Yahoo and Bing with exceptions where a category is a better match for the keyword. In other words, it is working exactly as it should in Yahoo and Bing.

After a year of this frustration I just upgraded to a new site on Magento Community and surprise, the same problem! The SEO moz analyzer has flagged significant duplicate content issues which I think is at the heart of my problem. I have asked my developer to address these but let's just say that customer service is not his forte. I am even starting to doubt he knows what to do although the site appears is well done.

Given that it is a brand new site and duplicate content in Magento is to be expected (from what I have now read), I am deeply discouraged that my developer did not or could not plan for this so here I am again!

Can anyone give me guidance on what to do? I have read a lot about canonicalization and it seems complicated especially if you have 1000 duplicate page titles. I have seen that there are some extensions (i.e. Ultimate SEO Suite by aheadWorks) for Magento that claim to be able to solve duplicate content problems but I am really just grasping at straws and do not have the confidence or skills to implement this on my own.

10 Responses

I would be more than happy to spend some time analyzing your site talking to you about it and really figuring this out. If you have 1000 duplicate page titles that is something you can change and I'm more than happy to tell you how to fix most of this at no cost. However when I do work I partner with the guys recommended here however if you're interested I'd be more than happy to assess your site get to the bottom of this problem and fix it.

So you know canonicalization is nor complicated or hard to implement especially using a CMS like Magento now given that complexities I can't tell you what's wrong right now and the size of your site but if you want to talk about it and have me analyze it for free I'd be happy to do that for you.

just to let you know a few things I just discovered you have no sitemap.xml page you have no robot.txt

your ratio needs to be slightly higher your text to HTML ratio is 26 as of now it should be higher so Google may be penalizing you for thin content without a sitemap Google will still crawl your site of course however a site map tells it where you would like it to go robot text is something that is absolutely necessary and keeps the robots from going in places that create duplicate content. This will probably be a pretty easy fix I sent you a private message with my information feel free to contact me

Thanks for responding. I think there must be some mistake as I do have a sitemap page that is being submitted to Google daily (I double checked in webmaster tools). Of course, I cannot speak to the effectiveness of the site map structure. I will take a look at the private message. Since the site map is being published does that change the source of the problem?

your the homepage is redirecting to www.leatherhidestore.com/servlet/StoreFront then back again
"Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.leatherhidestore.com. Would you like to see data for that URL instead?"
without the/ however the storefront URL is better off without /servlet/ if it can be helped. The amount of linking root domains and see box along with the moz score and moz trust will make it so search engines continually gravitate towards www.leatherhidestore.com/servlet/StoreFront
you have very complicated redirection problems and that's not a bad thing because those are easily fixed most of the time. Did you work with your search engine optimization consultant when you were working with their developer or was it pure developer doing the SEO?
here some information Below I'm sorry about the format it's in however it gives you some very clear data on some of the problems with your site.
one thing I might recommend if you have not found the data useful here is a full site analysis with recommendations on what to do next you can find that for $200 here I strongly recommend it whether you go with a SEO to fix this or you try to do with the developer however I do not know your developer but from the site I can tell you your return on the investment will be much higher if you use somebody that understands search engine optimization take a look at using
http://www.alexa.com/siteaudit
now please understand it will not give you all the answers or SEO your site for you however it's a step in right direction like I said if you would like to talk I may know I can tell you quite a bit about your site.

The canonical tag is a neat little gadget that’s supposed to let you tell search engines the correct URL for any page. So, by adding <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.iansnerdvana.com/”> to any page, I could tell visiting search bots to index just that version, and to direct all link authority to that one URL. It sounds ideal.

You can avoid the heartbreak of bad canonicalization, or at least minimize it, by doing a few simple things:

Link consistently to your home page from within your own site. Use a single URL for your home page. Don’t mix in instances of ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html’ with ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’. If you aren’t doing this properly right now, a quick change may have a big impact on SEO.

Yes the URL with the servlet was required by Prostores, my old platform, so when we moved over to Magento I was able to have my dedicated domain name. A 301 was put into place for the www.leatherhidestore.com/servlet/StoreFront but since the move was just done on 11/5 I am wondering if Google is still sorting this all out? This servlet URL is no longer indexed by Google and leatherhidestore.com also directs to www.leatherhidestore which is my preferred domain. I know the use of rel=canonical will help but what specifically might be going on that would lead Google to choose things like my FAQ page or randon products instead of my homepage? All my competitors have their hompage ranking so it cannot be the nature of the products. This is even more vexing since I have a solid backlink profile that nearly all points to my homepage? It does not make sense.

your homepage is redirecting too many times and I am not inside the website so I cannot tell you with 100% accuracy as my scan is still taking place however I am 99% certain the answer is your FAQ page has more links going to it or more page authority or trust. You are absolutely correct when you say the competitors homepages will be the 1st ones found in they should be especially in Google what you're saying is extremely odd I agree with you on that however there is a logical explanation for it search engine optimization is not voodoo there is something wrong with your homepage if not many things 1st let's talk about rel=canonical it is vital to tell Google what you believe is your homepage content so if you want www.leatherhidestore.com to be here homepage telling Google using leatherhidestore.com

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.leatherhidestore.com/"/>
will drastically improve your sites ability to place the homepage

in 1st place in Google you have to understand if you have tons of duplicate content including descriptions and titles on your homepage you're being penalized plus you don't have very much content on their you really should have more text like I said before I would be happy to go over this with you if you would like you may ring me and I will tell you at no charge what I believe you should do.

like I said I can tell you how to fix your site if you wish to chat with me about it I'm more than happy to do that but my advice regardless of what you do is use a search engine optimization specialist not just the developer we are far different from developers and they do their thing we do ours if you want to rank you need to make some adjustments to your site.

your link profile is not okay I am not trying to be negative but this is not good these are your inbound links link exchanges trading links and link directories that are "guaranteed to perform number 1" are junk Google is penalizing you for this is unfortunately worse than having no links it is a pickle being put into the situation as to what to do you can remove them or not the general consensus I go with is leave them but build quality links it's not easy it's not cheap but it works and it's the only thing that works if you have not been penalized severely for the way your site is set up and these links I put bad and very bad next to the ones that are really awful some of these are legit but maybe 5 of them you need to simply think about what you want to do with this website do you want to fix it up and actually have it working correctly Google is looking for you to build the brand along with provide content that is truly good if not great they want you to be the best that whatever niche you are in and links like this tell me this is a bad link profile but with a lot of help you can change all this. I would question whoever has been giving you advice and I would like to see what SEOMoz has to say I believe they can shed more light on this and I and I do not want to sound like I am saying negative things all the time when I really just want to be of help. So I am asking for SEOmoz to tell us what they think maybe shed some light on this

Yes, like many folks I do have some crappy links. Moz is a little behind as I have BBB and about 1/2 dozen high authority links not accounted for (SEO spyglass is a better assessment of link profile). More importantly, is that some of my main competitors that have less moz authority and really crappy links are sitting on top of the SERPs. I actually have lots of keywords ranking high (especially in Yahoo and Bing where the domain is perceived correctly). Even the random products and categories that are selected by google for my keywords get respectful page 2 rank but these pages have no PR or DA and I have to think that if Google recognized my homepage as the authority page I would be neck and neck with competitors that have a fraction of the quality site (and content) that I do plus they have much more polluted linking profiles. See why I am so frustrated?

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